Tag Archives: Jetpack Carousel photo viewer

2014/07/06 (N) Charmed

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Between the landscapers, tree trimming, and having grand-daughter Madeline here for several nights I have not worked at my desk very much this past week.  I have several projects in process that require me to work at my computer(s) and the most efficient place for that work is generally in my office at my desk.

Since we did not get to go out for our usual ham radio club breakfast yesterday we treated ourselves to a trip to Panera in Brighton this morning.  Comfy chairs, good Wi-Fi, yummy bagels, and tasty, unlimited coffee made for a pleasant morning.  When we were working we went to the local Panera by our previous house almost every Sunday morning.  We did not expect to see the landscapers today, and that turned out to be the case.

I had three main objectives for today and got one of them partially completed.  That’s about “par for the course,” as the saying goes.  I continued to research WordPress plug-ins that would provide a better display of WP gallery images and finally concluded that the best option was the Carousel feature of the Jetpack plug-in from Automattic.  My second choice was the Responsive Lightbox by dFactory but, based on the descriptions, the Carousel more closely matched the functionality I was looking for.

I installed the Jetpack on the FMCA Freethinker website I am developing to test it.  This website only had a few image galleries, each of which only had a few images, so it was a contained experiment.  The plug-in installed without difficulty and it was easy to activate and link through my WordPress.com account.  It was also easy to activate and configure the Carousel component and de-activate most of the other components that I did not need/want at this time.  When I viewed the existing galleries the thumbnails on the page looked the same as before but when I clicked on an image the Jetpack Carousel took over the display of the gallery.  Instead of opening the image in a browser page it displayed the image in a full screen lightbox with forward and backward arrows.  It also had a button to view the current image at its “full size” and provided information about the technical aspects of how the image was created (camera, lens, aperture, shutter speed, etc.).  So without having to recreate galleries, or edit the shortcodes on pages/posts where the galleries appear, any native WP Gallery on the site now displayed better; much better.  And it was free.

I have learned not to be overconfident when it comes to software, so it did not surprise me when the installation on the new SLAARC/WP website did not go as smoothly as the Freethinker installation.  The SLAARC site is hosted on GoDaddy and, according to the Jetpack support forum on WordPress.org, users were having all sorts of problems following a GoDaddy server upgrade just a week ago.  I got an “internal server error” on my first attempt, followed by an installation failure due to the presence of pre-existing folders.  I had to log in to GoDaddy and use the file manager to delete the Jetpack plug-in folder and everything it contained.  While I was logged in to GoDaddy I had to close and re-open the file manager twice to get it to work.  I also ran CCleaner on my laptop which cleared the Google Chrome browser cache.  “The third time’s a charm,” as the saying goes, and I finally got it installed, activated, and configured.  I tested it and it worked like a charm.  I sent an e-mail off to Mike (W8XH) and Larry (K8UT) to let them know and ask them to take a look when they had time.

We watched another episode of Doc Martin, during which we had another momentary power failure.  This one was so brief that our whole house generator did not even notify us of the power blip.  As the episode was concluding we heard the faint rumble of distant thunder.  A check of The Weather Channel and Wundermap on our iPads showed a large storm cluster north west of us moving east.  It looked like it might miss us, but a little while later we lost our power again, this time long enough to trigger the notification from the GenSet, but not long enough to cause it to start.  Within 10 minutes of that second power blip we had a steady summer rain event.  It looked like it might rain through the overnight.  If so, the landscapers won’t be able to work on the retaining walls on Monday, at least not with the excavator.

 

2014/07/05 (S) Re-Search

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Contractors who do outside work, such as excavators, builders, and landscapers are at the mercy of the weather, so they work when they can, and when they can work, they often put in long hours.  For those of us who made our living doing “white collar” work for companies with paid holidays, the 4th of July often meant a 3- or 4-day weekend.  For other kinds of workers, the 4th of July is a day off; one day, and for yet others (think retail) it is just another workday.  It doesn’t matter that it fell on a Friday this year.  The landscapers couldn’t work on Thursday because of the overnight rain.  No work means no pay.  Saturday July 5th, however, was forecast to be great weather for working outside, and with sunny skies and no rain since Thursday, our job site had dried out sufficiently to allow people and machines to work.  Alas, the holiday spirit was with them and they did not show up first thing this morning like I thought they might.

Since grand-daughter Madeline spent her second night in a row with us last night she was still here this morning.  Consequently we did not go to our ham radio club breakfast in South Lyon like we usually do on Saturday morning.  Madeline woke up hungry and Grandma Linda had her bottle warmed up and ready to go.  She had also prepped all of the ingredients for her yummy vegan blueberry pancakes.  Madeline had a little banana and some fresh blueberries while grandma cooked the pancakes and I made the coffee.  We all enjoyed our breakfast.

Madeline Eloise sitting on our fake rock in our front yard (it's the cover for our well).

Madeline Eloise sitting on our fake rock in our front yard (it’s the cover for our well).

After breakfast we played and read and went outside to walk around in the driveway.  Our son called and we figured out who was going to travel where and when to get Madeline back home.  He was working on a project to rebuild their front porch/steps and was involved in painting wood pieces prior to assembling them, so we agreed to drive Madeline to their house in Ann Arbor in time for a light lunch before her usual nap time.  That also allowed us to stop at the Whole Foods market near their house on our way out of town.  A Whole Foods market is the only thing we do not have in the Brighton/Howell/Hartland area that we truly miss.  We would shop there several times a week if we had one nearby.

I managed to sneak away to the basement occasionally to do a load of laundry and install 126 updates on our Linux computer.  The updates involved file downloads totaling just over of 310+ MB so I started the process and let it run.  We get an effective download speed from our AT&T High Speed Internet (HSI) DSL connection of just over 1 Mb/sec or 64 Mb/min.  That is roughly 8 MB/min.  At that speed, 320 MB takes about 40 minutes to transfer, assuming AT&T doesn’t detect the amount of data being transferred and “throttle” (slow down) the speed.  Cell phone companies are known to do this but it is less clear whether AT&T does that sort of thing with their landline services.

We got back to the house at 2:15 PM.  Linda developed a headache while we were out, so she took some meds, put the groceries away, and laid down to rest.  There was no sign of the landscapers and no phone call, so there was no chance at that point that they would show up today.  That was OK with us; it is a holiday weekend and it was their idea to come work today, not ours; I just said it was OK if that’s what they wanted to do.  Apparently they didn’t.  The one thing I was looking forward to was having Steve show me how to operate the Kobelco sk35sr-3 excavator and then practicing operating it by removing concrete blocks, bricks, downed trees, and other detritus from the woods by the road southwest of our house.  Just behind these woods is where they are piling all of the construction debris anyway, so I would be able to position the excavator to allow me to grab most of the trash out of the woods and then swing it over and deposit it on the pile.  Maybe Monday?

Yesterday I posted a question to the WordPress.org support forum for the Jetpack plug-in and I got a reply a couple of hours later that directly answered my question.  I wanted to install/activate the Jetpack on more than one self-hosted website and needed to know if I could use a single WordPress.com account or if I needed a separate account for each site?  I was glad to find out that I only needed the one account that I already have.  The Jetpack plug-in is massive overkill for what I need to accomplish immediately, but some of the reviews suggested that it is so comprehensive it may be the last plug-in I ever have to install.  That is unlikely for a number of reasons, and a bit contrary to the open source nature of WordPress and the international community of developers that support it, but the plug-in does have 33 different “components.”  For most of those features there are other plug-ins available–in some cases lots of them—but this provides everything in a neat package with its own special place on the admin panel menu.

Linda was feeling better after a long, much-needed nap but did not feel like cooking.  She picked up ingredients at Whole Foods today to make mock beef stroganoff but decided to make it tomorrow.  Our go-to for no-prep meals are the various frozen products from Amy’s.  We try to always have a few in the freezer for occasions when Linda does not have the time or interest to prepare a meal from scratch.  Tonight we had the lasagna.  Linda wanted some fresh greens with dinner but did not feel like making a salad so she used a bed of mixed greens as a base for the lasagna.  If that sounds a bit strange, all I can say is that it was very nice for both taste and texture.

I spent more time this evening investigating the WordPress Jetpack plug-in, the result of which was that I deferred installing and activating it.  The attraction of this plug-in is that the Carousel feature works with the existing WP Gallery shortcode(s).  That means it works retroactively with every page and post containing a WP Gallery and that I would continue to create galleries they way I always have using the native WP Gallery functionality.  That sounds like exactly what I need, except that on further investigation I started seeing comments about banner ads, and a feature that allows website/blog visitors to comment on individual images with no easy way to disable it.  The workaround involves custom CSS code.  Ugh.

I kept looking and found a plug-in where the “author” had simply “forked” (extracted) the code for the Carousel function from the Jetpack plug-in and offered it as a separate plug-in.  Ignoring whether that was even ethical, some of the reviews suggested that it did not work correctly and that support issues were not being resolved.  I need something more reliable and better supported so I kept looking and found a very extensive plug-in that was free and had been downloaded over 1,000,000 times!  Now that has to be a great plug-in, right?  Maybe; maybe not.  The reviews were very mixed and many seemed to complain about the constant “tinkering” the author does with the plug-in, issuing updates every 3 – 4 days.

If I was willing to spend money for a plug-in my options would be greatly expanded, but I have looked at those as well and they all have mixed reviews.  The leading contender is the NextGEN Gallery plug-in, but the biggest downside with all of these gallery plug-ins is that they do not work with the native WP Gallery shortcodes which, in turn, would require me to rebuild existing galleries from within the plug-in. The ones that I find the most annoying are the ones with a free version that turns out to just be a teaser; the features I need are always in the “pro” or “premium” version.  An episode of Doc Martin gave me a needed and entertaining break from my research, which is appropriate in this situation as I have searched for a good image display plug-in before and now I am searching for one again.